Typewriters in the News

Another typewriter has appeared on a wall in Reading, England, just three weeks after the now world famous Banksy mural was spotted at Reading Gaol. This new black-and-white stencilled image looks exactly like the Banksy typewriter, but is on the wall of a bridge. First it was there on its own, now it is suspended below an image of a pensive boy beside the words, "Cherish, Love and Hope". The original at Reading Gaol had a "Team Robbo" tag added over the weekend, but that has now been removed. The new mural has under it the word "Peachy" in a typewriter font. All a bit of a mystery really. We know "Robbo" was a Banksy rival, and maybe "Peachy" is another street artist adopting the "Banksy-style". The original, an escaping prisoner using bedsheets to lower himself and a typewriter, was thought be to a nod to Reading Gaol's most famous prisoner, Oscar Wilde.

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In Seifhennersdorf in Saxony, Germany, Steffi Rücker, dressed up as Lotti Langohr in an Easter bunny costume, sits at a Robotron typewriter in a wooden house on the grounds of the children's and youth recreation center "Querxenland". Baskets of mail from children arrive at the Upper Lusatian Easter Bunny Post Office every spring.

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Yesterday was "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day" in San Francisco. Here poet James O'Brien Makowski types on a Royal Quiet Deluxe portable during an impromptu gathering outside San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore in remembrance of Ferlinghetti, the bookstore's co-founder. The day before the gathering, February 22, Ferlinghetti had died of interstitial lung disease. Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was a poet, social activist, publisher and painter. He would have celebrated his 102nd birthday yesterday. He was best known for his first collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and has sold more than one million copies.